In common parlance, a blade server is a stripped-down server computer having a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. Blade servers typically are lacking many components to save space, minimize power consumption and provide for other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer. However, in this application, “blade server” shall be specially defined to mean as follows: any computer (see DEFINITIONS section) that is or can be used to do the work typically performed by a blade server, without regard to components that it may or may not lack relative to other computers. “Proper blade server” shall be herein defined to mean: any computer that is considered as a blade server under currently conventional definitions or understandings of the term “blade server.”
In a data center, the blade servers are characterized by machine type, network addresses and storage addresses which are virtual addresses. In case of a blade server (sometimes herein simply referred to as a “server”) failure, another blade server is picked up from the spare pool of standby servers, to replace the failing server. In existing solutions for the fail over: (i) the failing server is powered off: (ii) the addresses (network and storage) of the failing blade server are applied to the new replacing server; (iii) the replacing server is switched on to the power ON mode; (iv) the replacing server is booted to an operating system (OS); (v) the replacing server takes over the failing server workload. Typically, this process consumes from 5 to 7 minutes. During this time interval, the services offered by the failing blade server are unavailable. In conventional blade server operations, the spare pool servers are in stand by mode. They are booted to an OS only when they are chosen for the replacement and the address of the failing server is applied to one of them as part of the replacement process described above. In conventional systems the firmware that initializes, probes and configures the appropriate input/output (I/O) cards will only run during the process of booting.